r it, so many years had
passed,--so many that the little boy had grown up to a whole man, yes,
a clever man, and a pleasure to his parents; and he had just been
married, and, together with his little wife, had come to live in the
house here, where the garden was; and he stood by her there whilst she
planted a field-flower that she found so pretty; she planted it with
her little hand, and pressed the earth around it with her fingers. Oh!
what was that? She had stuck herself. There sat something pointed,
straight out of the soft mould.

It was----yes, guess!--it was the pewter soldier, he that was lost up
at the old man's, and had tumbled and turned about amongst the timber
and the rubbish, and had at last laid for many years in the ground.

The young wife wiped the dirt off the soldier, first with a green
leaf, and then with her fine handkerchief--it had such a delightful
smell, that it was to the pewter soldier just as if he had awaked from
a trance.

"Let me see him," said the young man. He laughed, and then shook his
head. "Nay, it cannot be he; but he reminds me of a story about a
pewter soldier which I had when I was a little boy!" And then he told
his wife about the old house, and the old man, and about the pewter
soldier that he sent over to him because he was so very, very lonely;
and he told it as correctly as it had really been, so that the tears
came into the eyes of his young wife, on account of the old house and
the old man.

"It may possibly be, however, that it is the same pewter soldier!"
said she, "I will take care of it, and remember all that you have told
me; but you must show me the old man's grave!"

"But I do not know it," said he, "and no one knows it! all his friends
were dead, no one took care of it, and I was then a little boy!"

"How very, very lonely he must have been!" said she.

"Very, very lonely!" said the pewter soldier; "but it is delightful
not to be forgotten!"

"Delightful!" shouted something close by; but no one, except the
pewter soldier, saw that it was a piece of the hog's-leather hangings;
it had lost all its gilding, it looked like a piece of wet clay, but
it had an opinion, and it gave it:

"The gilding decays,
But hog's leather stays!"

This the pewter soldier did not believe.

------------

THE DROP OF WATER.

What a magnifying glass is, you surely know--such a round sort of
spectacle-glass that makes everything full a hundred times larger than